Fr. Seán ÓLaoire

There's the atmosphere, which is the womb of the planet.

So she creates a womb for herself in order to gestate life.

The third level is the biosphere.

And now she's giving birth to flora and fauna.

And then there's the kind of the stage we're approaching now is the noosphere.

Teilhard de Chardin talked about the noosphere from the Greek word noos meaning mind, that now there's a sheath of consciousness around the biosphere.

And it's a very dangerous transition going from biosphere to noosphere because we have the technological capacity to literally destroy even the physiosphere itself in a nuclear holocaust.

And so that transition is really, really difficult.

And that's where we're at right now.

Now, I believe there are three more stages after that.

There's what I call, the next one is the anima sphere, anima from the Latin meaning soul, that is the soul of the planet.

And then the next one, I call it the pneuma sphere, pneuma meaning spirit in Greek, the spirit of the planet itself, and then ultimately source itself.

And that we're pacing Gaia in this movement, in this evolutionary trajectory.

And that as we're moving into the noosphere, so is Gaia.

And that in some senses, our respect for life and our protection of life would be such that we won't need the same elements in order to sustain us.

That we're not identified anymore with our mere physicality, or even our emotionality, or our rationality, that we're identified with the soul self.

And so I think it would be possible that we can actually survive on energy transfers of various kinds, which may not involve taking life at all of any kind.

But, you know, we may approach that piece.

But it is appropriate that at earlier stages of it, we're going to need to eat vegetables or maybe kill, you know, in order to eat.

And when that's done in a culture fashion with respect for the one who's sacrificing its life on our behalf,